Date: Friday , September 01, 2006
Berkeley Design Automation Inc., a developer of software that analyzes the design of analog and radio frequency integrated circuits has raised $6 million in its second round of funding led by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. Matsushita has joined previous investors Woodside Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners in the funding. It will use the investment to launch its Precision Circuit Analysis technology.

Ravi Subramanian, President & CEO says, “The VC interest in a company like ours stems from the fact that there is a large and growing market to solve this pain, and companies that can successfully demonstrate how they can materially reduce the time-to-volume for analog/RF-rich chip designs in these markets with a compelling business model are attractive investments.”

Subramanian says the target customers for his company’s products are chip design teams that are targeting end-markets such as consumer (flat-panel TV, DVD players, digital camera, multimedia), wireless (WiFi, cellular transceivers), computing (PCI, XAUI, SerDes), and networking (10G, SONET, etc). “All these markets have large and growing analog/RF problems, with aggressive time-to-market pressures,” says Subramanian adding the demand for company’s products comes from the increasing gap that analog, RF and mixed-signal chip designers are facing between what today’s analog verification tools can deliver and what is required for today’s chip designs in consumer, communications, computing, and networking applications.

The market for analog/RF EDA tools was more than $450 million in 2005 and will be worth half a billion dollars in 2007. It is one of the few sectors in EDA that is growing quickly, with double-digit growth in the last two years. “We believe that BDA’s products will drive growth in analog EDA by creating a new market for precision FastSPICE verification tools, software products,” Subramanian says about the market.

Subramanian isn’t quite worried about competition. “We welcome it,” he says but adds today we deliver a unique capability enabled by our proprietary Precision Circuit Analysis technology that gives our products the ability to deliver full accuracy with a 5-10x speed-up out of the box over existing analog and RF simulators.